


the wards and the winds

by skitterdwell



Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Bathing/Washing, F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2018-01-03 04:33:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1065801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitterdwell/pseuds/skitterdwell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A domestic Logyn plot bunny.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the wards and the winds

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fic I've posted in a while, and the first on AO3. How exciting! Unfortunately, it's not my greatest (or most original and so forth), but I'm just pleased to be writing again! So I hope you enjoy this. 
> 
> (also posted on my writing tumblr, The Tsar's Hummingbee)

The howl of wind pulls Sigyn from her dreams this particular evening. She had been dreaming of something – a scene from her childhood, maybe, with the gurgle of flowing water and the shade of a willow tree – but she cannot recall it in its entirety.

Not a nightmare. Not this time. But she is not left to bask in her rest. The wind knocks the tree against the walls of the house, and the house itself groans with old wood; she wraps herself more securely in the bedclothes and listens. Her mother had once explained that the house and the wind were having a conversation, the house protecting them and asking the wind to leave them alone… Sigyn grew out of those notions soon after they were taught to her, but there was comfort in their memory.

A particularly fierce gust of wind is met with an arduous groan, and Sigyn sits up, wondering if the wards of the house were secure. They are ancient – set by the ancestors of her house millennia before she was born – but she had been instructed in their use and maintenance, and during the hours of the day she is too preoccupied to pay any attention. Now is as good a time as any to check. She sighs, pushes the heels of her hands against her eyes, and slips out from under the covers. A pair of soft house shoes awaits her feet, and a robe goes on over her night clothes; she pads downstairs, feeling her way through the familiar old stairwell and sitting room without the aid of a light.

She proceeds throughout the house, checking the talismans at three of the corners of the house before being distracted by a scratching at the front door. Muttering a quick curse, she darts forward and opens it – the house cat scurries in, his fur mussed every which way by the weather, and streaks into the shadows. Presumably, to begin grooming himself. He’ll sulk for days, she thinks with irritation as she closes the door behind him.

Sigyn is about to visit the fourth and final talisman as she hears something upstairs clatter to the ground. She’d left her woman’s dagger upstairs, and she is suddenly keenly aware of the fact that she is submerged in darkness. The anxiety and fear that had been at a low simmer for the past few months suddenly becomes a slow boil in her stomach, and she casts about for some kind of weapon. Her magic is merely adequate; better to put some weight behind it. She gropes about for a candlestick, and, having laid purchase to one, took a few moments to infuse it with power.  

Stealing up the stairs was yet another exercise in remembering; her sister had taught her to tread on the wood closest to the walls, as it would not squeak as loudly, and games of hiding and stealth had shown her where the shadows lay deepest among the quiet house. The noise from earlier had seemed to emanate from her bedroom, and the door to it is ajar, just as she’d left it. Candlestick raised, she eases the door open a little more and listens, straining for the slightest noise –

Nothing.

She checks the other rooms and finds nothing, illuminating each to complete the search and ease her pounding heart. At last, she sits at the edge of the bed and puts her head in her hands, wondering if she’d finally begun to lose her mind.

A very real footstep jerks her head up, and she gasps, pulling her arms closer to her body, reaching for the candlestick on the bedspread.

It is no matter. She recognizes the figure before her, and even if that had not disarmed her, his actions would have.

Loki – covered in grime and blood and soaked with storm rain, his hair in tangles and falling into his eyes – stands there, his eyes carefully observing the floor. Without raising his eyes to hers, he walks forward, kneels before her, wraps his arms around her waist and buries his face in her lap.

“Loki…” she murmurs, her shock not entirely gone.

“I’m tired,” he replies, nestling further into her.

Sigyn does not ask for explanations. She does not ask for the key to his secrets. She trusts that when he speaks to her, it is his will; she knows that he will never lie to her. It is understood. 

Silence is as natural to them as words.

His continued silence, however, is not satisfactory.

“You will not come to bed,” she says, moving a dirty black strand behind his ear.

“Won’t I?” he asks, looking up at her with one green eye.

“You will not.”

“Who will stop me, wife?”

“ _I_ will, husband,” she says, injecting a bite she does not entirely feel into her words.

He is saved from asking why as she bids him to stand up, and pulls him towards the bathing chamber. There, she sets the sunken bathing pool to filling and helps him undress. Overcoat, braces, leather armor, tunic, undershirt, boots, breeches. They are discarded without much interest; there would be time to care for it all later. She leaves him to finish stripping as she tests the water. Hot. Good. Her robe and boots are left adjacent to the pile of his battle garb. It would not do for them to become wet.

She lays out towels as he steps into the water, hissing as the heat is soaked up by his bruised body. She turns around to find him inspecting the jars of scented oils surrounding the pool. He lifts the lid of one and sniffs; his eyebrows rise fractionally, and he drizzles it into the warm water without asking permission.  It’s her favorite, of course. How he could know, she doesn’t care at this moment, as she sits down behind him with a selection of combs and soaps and sponges.

“Will my lady wife not join me?” The sly curl is back in his voice, however faint, and she answers by taking a bowl of bath water and dumping it over his head. She takes a moment to push her sleeping braid over her shoulder and then begins to untangle his hair, sorting through each snarl and tangle without speaking.

It is quiet. Her hands are deft, well-practiced with her own long locks, and Loki remains quiet, even as she tugs on the more stubborn of the knots with less than her usual subtlety.

Silence is natural to them, and it is part of their language.  Loki listens as she tells him her anger with his hair, her frustration as she takes up a sponge and soap and begins to wash his back, her sorrow as she traces the scars on his shoulders, and her affection as she begins to wash his hair, massaging the soap into his scalp, careful not to let it escape into his eyes. He listens, and does not speak back. Sigyn does not appreciate being interrupted.

She lifts each arm to wash it, and here he cannot quite decipher her meaning as she scrubs them – with less force than before, but with the same degree of attention and precision. She kisses both of his wrists once she is finished with them, and then turns her attention to his neck. He moves to stare at the ceiling obligingly and she thanks him by stroking the shell of his ear.

The unspoken tension in the room dissipates with the steam. He climbs from the pool and swathes himself in the towel as she leaves to find something for him to sleep in. He is fully dry and almost shivering when he hears Sigyn’s voice from the bedroom.

“Come to bed, Loki.”

He enters for the second time that night, naked and pale in the dim light. Sigyn sits again on the bed, and has him sit between her legs as she dries and braids his hair. He slips into a sleeping robe and curls up, waiting, as she returns to the bathing room to extinguish the lights, and then to the bedside to lower their own lighting.

She smiles wearily before the lights go out, and tells him with her hands to get under the covers. His face finds her neck and breathes long and deep as they lie down, and she’s too tired to cry. So she says as much with a tired kiss to the nose, and wraps her arms around him, and she lets herself return to sleep.

Some time later, before she is entirely under, she starts herself awake with a realization.

“The wards...”

“Secure,” replies Loki, kiss-nibbling at her collarbone, pulling her back down.

And because it is Loki, the Liesmith ( _her_ Liesmith), she knows it to be true.

They fall asleep, and neither dreams.

**Author's Note:**

> did I mention I'm new? Leave me a review. ^^


End file.
